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Funny you mention homebrewing. We're so near the distribution center for http://morebeer.com/ that I stop in for odds and ends. Last time, I bought some malt, and I've been using 3% in my sourdough breads, including today. Too much has a strange effect on the dough, but a bit adds a wonderful aroma. In cooking, it can be hard to sense a 6% difference, but compounding a dozen 6% differences is doubling, which one can sense. I'd say we live for the days we can get anything to come out twice as good as before; those days are rare. Roasting or drying one's own tomatoes is by itself a doubling, over opening any can I've ever tasted. Laurie and I frequently debate what we'd keep if we could save exactly one kitchen quirk we've picked up over the years. The answer is always the same: We'd keep our tomatoes, and buy flour. We have other quirks (easy, now!) but none in contention with these two. Nevertheless, home ground flour is dramatically different from what one can buy. One is buying e.g. organic hard red winter wheat berries at a health food store (just don't look at the aisle after aisle of homeotoxins and the crackpots buying them, on the way back to the bulk bins) and grinding the whole berry, then sieving out the bran. Any bought flour is a carefully constructed product involving aged components of grain, none of which can easily spoil. There is a parallel here between freshly squeezed orange juice, and a supermarket carton of orange juice. Our flour smells alive in ways that bought flour does not; the most likely suspect here is the germ, whose oils are both great for health and flavor, and go rancid in days. To understand commercial flour, consider a subject in which one is an expert, and think of the gulf between a lay understanding of the processes involved, and the understanding one obtains after putting the proverbial 10,000 hours. Commercial flour is easily this involved; there are 600 page PDF treatises online that I've glanced at, trying to solve individual problems. One individual problem is that bought flour is aged, while home ground flour cannot be similarly aged without going rancid. This affects bread doughs; "green" flours lead to flattened "flying saucer" loaves because the glutens fail to develop properly. The easiest workaround is to add on the order of 40 parts per million ascorbic acid, which has a marked effect on the dough. (This isn't far off from a person taking a typical pill, which is why I'm never doing that again!) One accomplishes this by mixing a 20:1 reduction with white flour, taking that mixture and making another 20:1 reduction to obtain a 440:1 dilution. (Check: (20+1)^2 = 441.) I used 15 grams of such a mixture in today's bread dough.